5 iPhone 4S Cases You’ll Love

Case Race

Scores of Apple fans were disappointed Tuesday when the long-awaited iPhone 5 – which was to be thinner and have a wider screen than its predecessor – never materialized. Instead we got the iPhone 4S, which is smarter and faster but looks the same.
The good news, though, is that if you’re getting the 4S and want a case to protect it, you don’t have to look far. The iPhone 4 cases already on the market will fit the new phone just fine, and there are plenty of very cool ones already on sale. While people on the train won’t be able to tell that you got the new phone just by looking at the 4S, you can at least wow them by picking up one of these cool cases.
Photo Credit: AP

The Stylish

Plaid is in this season, or so we’ve been told. If you want your phone to look like a lumberjack (or better yet, a hipster dressed as a lumberjack), we like this line of plaid cases from Speck, which retail for $39.95. The design is by Burton, which is usually in the business of making rad-looking snowboards.
Photo Credit: SpeckProducts.com

The Steampunk

Some people love the idea of swaddling the latest technology in a retro case. And by retro, we mean 19th century. This line of phone cases from EXOvault looks like what you’d build if you were sent back in time with your phone and wanted to make a case to protect it, with a whole lot of brass and wood to go around. Among the designs is a holster that can be used as a belt buckle, but they don’t come cheap: The least expensive of the line is this aluminum model at $79, and the titanium case will set you back $400 – what you’d pay for two new iPhones.
Photo Credit: exovault.com

The Juice

The iPhone 4S is supposed to have enhanced battery life, with the company claiming it will last for eight hours of talk time. But for some people that’s just not enough, especially if you’re using GPS and wireless Internet and you have to go a long time between charges. Enter the Mophie Juice Pack, which looks like a bulky case but actually serves as a secondary battery to recharge your phone on the go. The battery case itself is rechargeable, and you don’t even need to remove it from the phone to juice it up at the end of the day. And it provides the protection of a hard-shell case while also enhancing the sound of the iPhone’s tiny speakers. It costs $80.
Photo Credit: mophie.com

The Life of the Party

If you drink a lot of bottled beer, you could hang a bottle opener from your keychain… or you could get a phone case with one built in. The iBottleopener does exactly what you think it does, though some reviewers on Amazon say that it functions better as a conversation starter than as a phone case. It can be had for $19 plus shipping.
Photo Credit: ibottleopener.shopify.com

The Wallet

Want one less thing to remember in the morning? You could combine your phone and wallet. Twelve South, which designs stylish accessories for Apple products, offers the BookBook for iPhone, which looks like a tiny leather-bound book but is actually a phone case and wallet rolled into one. The wallet side has room for your ID, a few cards and some cash. The downside is that if you lose your wallet you also lose your phone – though as the company points out, that means you can use Apple’s Find my iPhone service (or one of the many third-party phone tracker services) to find both phone and wallet. It costs $60.
Photo Credit: twelvesouth.com

The Collector’s Item

Hard Candy offers this rubber and polycarbonate case for the iPhone 5. Wait, the iPhone 5? Yes, the company looked at the many rumors surrounding the phones and designed a case meant to fit the thin-and-wide design that never was. “We rolled the dice. We took a gamble,” admits the company. If you want the case anyway – either as a collector’s item or because you share the company’s optimism that such a phone will one day be released – you can have it for $35.95 starting Oct. 14. Just don’t expect it to fit any iPhone that actually exists right now.
Photo Credit: hardcandycases.com